Julia Lin

Julia Lin was born in Taiwan and spent her early childhood in Taiwan and Vietnam. She immigrated to Canada with her family when she was nine and has lived in the Vancouver area, Toronto in Ontario, and in northern British Columbia. She now lives in Vancouver. Lin holds a M.Sc. in Immunology from the University of Toronto, and a post-graduate degree in computer education from the University of British Columbia. Lin is one of the editors of AlliterAsian: Twenty Years of Ricepaper Magazine (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015).

Fiction (Short stories)

Miah: Stories

Publisher’s Synopsis

Miah means “fate” in Taiwanese. These linked, subtly understated stories trace the lives of three generations on Taiwanese, from the brutal Japanese occupation of their island in the early twentieth century to the “White Terror” that followed under the exiled Chinese Mainlanders and the Kuomintang, and finally to modern times. Gracefully evocative, informative, and humane, these stories offer a rare look at Taiwanese and modern Canadian life that is historical, personal, and completely honest.

Non-fiction (Biography)

Shadows of the Crimson Sun

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

After the Russian invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria (Manchukuo) in 1945, fourteen-year-old Akihisa Takayama escapes with his family to their ancestral Taiwan. Here they find themselves under the brutal Chinese dictatorship of the Kuomintang. In the 1960s, now a physician calling himself Charles Yang, he escapes with his young family to the United States, from where they finally go on to Canada to become among the first Taiwanese Canadians in Vancouver. Charles Yang’s experiences illuminate the “White Terror” of Taiwan, and the geopolitical dispute between Communist China and Taiwan over the meaning of “One China.” This is a rare, humane, and personal account of the little known histories of Manchukuo and Taiwanese immigration to North America.